This opens a new CIC project on the the Public Relations Industry and Climate where we will be conducting research on the PR industry role in the climate change debate, not a new subject, but not one that has really been tackled well.

After the Burson Peabody story, we wondered if the multi-billion dollar public relations industry has a climate conscience or even climate consciousness. Every other business sector has been ask to go on the record about climate change. It seemed no one had ever asked the multibillion dollar PR industry. So we asked them.

We sent a short survey to the top 25 public relations agencies in the United States (ranked by fee income, according to the industry journal, The Holmes Report). As the beginning of phase two of our survey we added the Brunswick Group to the query list. We emailed, sent certified mail and phoned Presidents, CEOs, General Counsels, Sustainability officers and as many high ranking officials as we could locate email, mailing addresses and phone numbers.

We asked four simple questions about the agencies’ work vis a vis climate change:

Does your company acknowledge the threat and challenge of climate change as companies like Walmart, CocaCola, Apple, Google, AIG, Swiss Re, NRG, Unilever and others have done?

Does your company have any internal carbon accounting policies or energy use reduction targets? Have you taken actions to reduce your “carbon footprint”?

Does your company have an internal Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy regarding climate change or the environment generally?

Has your agency advised any client corporations on communications around CSR programs with a specific climate change focus, or on other climate change related public relations efforts?

The PR Agencies Surveyed

All together, the 25 firms included in our survey (thus far), plus MSL Group which answered the survey for the newly acquired asset Qorvis Communications, garnered income far exceeding $5.5 Billion dollars in 2012, the latest year of data. There is a wide range in size. Edelman at the top had annual revenue of nearly $666 Million in 2012. The 25th ranked US PR firm, Bite Communications had revenue just under $27 Million. WPP, a large parent company that owns four of the top ten companies, responded to our survey as well.

Why this matters

The PR industry is the silent partner that expertly helps corporations exert their outsized influence through advertising campaigns. But well beyond old fashioned TV and newspaper advertisements, the campaigns designed by these ad firms now include complex online and social media campaign platforms and are often tied to policy objectives and have lobbying components. In fact many PR companies offer lobbying services and other communications advise on top of straight advertising campaigns. There have been many ads through the years promoting fossil fuel expansion, pressuring government to relax regulations, questioning the urgency of climate action. For a fascinating tabulation of this arm of the influence-peddling industry see The Unlobbyists by Thomas B. Edsall, from earlier this year in the New York Times.

Whether you call it “public relations”, “strategic communications”, “crisis management”, there is a whole class of companies that were not included in the first stage of our survey because their revenue didn’t make the cut on Holmes Report. We had to start and stop somewhere. There are much smaller firms who have a more insidious role in manipulating the public policy arena, such as Nichols-Dezenhall, now Dezenhall Resources which thrives on corporations or people in crisis, ready to advise them, for a large fee. Nichols-Dezenhall was hired by ExxonMobil to attack a public pressure campaign by Greenpeace, ended up setting up a front group Public Interest Watch, as revealed by Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. There is DCI Group whose managing partners got their start working for RJ Reynolds tobacco and now “helps corporations navigate their most challenging political, legislative and regulatory problems anywhere in the world.” DCI also laid heavy ammunition into the climate arena in the early 2000s with its pop-up site TechCentral Station, and later attacked Al Gore and other targets, with we at least Exxon’s backing for a time.